7, 12, and 19 for TWAWKI (I'm greedy)
7. Share your favorite joke/gag (if applicable).
The first thing that comes to mind is Illario never bothering to remember the name of any woman he's ever dated and kind of interchangeably thinking of them as "Stacy." One of the random character details I thought up but never specified is that Stacy is the only woman he ever dated who he was semi-serious about and he's still hung up on her. (She probably ended things before he could, or wouldn't stroke his ego as much as he wanted, or told him he spends too much money on hair gel.) It comes up three separate times, so I think it counts as a running gag, right?
“Stacy. Hey, Stacy—”
The woman keeps staring at her phone. Her tongue darts out to lick her tooth gem. He didn’t notice the tooth gem before, and its glint in her mouth sends a disgusted thrill up his spine.
“Hey,” he snaps, bending down closer to her eye-level. “I’m getting out of here, you want to come?”
She finally glances up, gives him another once-over.
“My name’s Heather.”
For two hours, Illario scrolls through every contact in his phone, looking for more people to call. He should be useful. He should do…something. But most of his contacts are random hookups or exes or weird-ass nicknames that don’t mean anything to him anymore:
Bad Idea Don’t Call. Camo Yoga Pants. DO NOT ANSWER Stage 4 Clinger. Hairy Toes. Mike Grindr. Mike Grindr Different Mike. Stacy. Stacy ???. Stacy New Number.
He calls them all anyway. None of them pick up.
Another empty bottle. If the internet still existed, they'd make a killing showing off all their empties. Illario used to eat that shit up on YouTube. Partially for the product recs, but mostly for all the identically pretty women holding up all the identical, empty serum jars. He hasn't seen a pretty woman in…weeks? Since that night at the bar, he realizes. Whatserface. With the tooth gem.
Stacy?
Honorable mention to Ghita, who doesn't even get Stacy status:
The caller ID says Rainbow Sprinkles, whatever the fuck that means.
“Who is this?” he says into the phone.
“Illario? You called me,” a woman says.
That doesn’t help—he called literally everyone. But her voice is familiar.
“Elena?”
“Ghita.”
He was close. Oh, oh shit, yes, perfect—she’s a cop. One of the local cops in Caterina’s pocket. They hooked up at the sheriff’s re-election party a year or two ago. There was an ice cream sundae bar.
It's all just so many levels of disrespectful and hopefully reinforces the idea of Illario as a manosphere bro who thinks of women as status symbols instead of... y'know, actual people.
12. Is there any aspect of your fic you considered changing? How would it have been different?
I thought about giving them a dog, the way Luli the dog is a throughline in Station Eleven. Lucanis's magic sensitivity shows up as pet allergies in this fic. There's a passing mention early on of him noticing a dog barking down the street and then not hearing it after a few days. There's also that nice little flashback to when he tried to bring a stray kitten home as a kid and Caterina made him put it back outside (where it probably died). The idea of them having something to take care of and focus their energy on besides each other was appealing, but ultimately I decided to leave that extra chaos factor out and keep the focus on just Lucanis and Illario alone.
19. Are there any particular headcanons or theories of yours that found their way into the fic?
I mean, the headcanon that Lucanis and Illario would really struggle to mend fences, even if they were given all the time and opportunity to do so, is kinda what the fic is all about. Even in a world where Lucanis forgives Illario for what he's done, I think that forgiveness would come from a place of conflict avoidance and putting family above everything else, and symbolize regression instead of growth. It's okay for Lucanis to not forgive Illario. Dare I say healthy, even?
